The Man of Twists and Turns

Elmore Leonard has 10 rules for writing. They don’t cover most of the important points of writing. They could really be called: Ten Rules for Writing That Isn’t So Bad, Even if You’re Not Much of Writer.

Still the rules have been turned into a book and are quoted with something a little more mystical than simple reverence by crime writers when I go to crime conferences. [...]

Writers usually decide to be writers before they know what they might write about. In my case, a journey from teenage isolation in Britain to the violence of the Middle East led me to the elements of my fiction which could be true — not just based on reality, but in the sense that they show something true about the souls of the people I had come to know and most of all about myself. Here I talk about how Dashiell Hammett, journalism and teenage alienation were staging points on that journey.

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As an award-winning crime writer, I’ve studied the greats of the genre and lectured about how they do what they do. Here I take my three favorite openings to crime novels — “Red Harvest” by Dashiell Hammett, “The Little Sister” by Raymond Chandler, and “The Saint-Fiacre Affair” by Georges Simenon — and examine what makes them great. Either as a writer or a reader, I hope you’ll be intrigued by the analysis.

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Last night my dream was a really terrific thriller plot. Naturally, because I thought I was watching a thriller unfold in images before me, I don’t remember much of what happened (do YOU remember what happens in a thriller after you’ve read it?)

However, it included a number of details which I find encouraging. First, I was one of the people duped by the bad guy. Second, I was fired from my job because I was blamed for the scam. Third, I didn’t care about the job, because it had been a good thriller. [...]

It’s hard to tell them apart, Wolfgang Mozart and the great composer’s sister Nannerl. Both had prominent noses, mischievous eyes, and a certain naiveté to their gaze. But there was a difference. Nannerl was a girl, and that decided which of these fabulous musical talents would be remembered. Until now. My novel MOZART’S LAST ARIA and the work of other artists are reviving this often-scorned sister.

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Georges Simenon wrote “L’Affaire Saint Fiacre” (“Maigret Goes Home”) in 1932. It’s one of the first of the 103 novels involved Inspector Jules Maigret. You can tell from books like this that the writer was a bit of a bastard. And we ought to be grateful for that.

The opening of “Saint Fiacre” (I’m going to look at the opening, rather than the opening paragraph, because the paragraphs are short, staccato) is laden with the strangeness of waking up in an unaccustomed place, and most of all the dismal return to a place whence one has fled. Here it is:

A timid scratching at the door; the sound of an object being put on the floor; a furtive voice:

“It’s half past five. The first bell for Mass has just been rung…”

“Are you taking communion?” [...]

I’ve a guest post on the Fresh Fiction blog and also there’s an interview with me on the CBS columnist Jeff Glor’s blog about my new novel Mozart’s Last Aria. Read the Fresh Fiction post to find out why I don’t think Mozart was an idiot. Read the CBS post to see why I think Caravaggio had a lot of balls.

I’m writing this in a plain office in the corner of a building that was described by the realtor as “exclusive,” though it doesn’t exclude despondent ultra-Orthodox Jews panhandling for cash, plumbers who break all the pipes you hadn’t called them to fix, or the cheerful lady who lets her dog pee in the elevator. There’s the hum of heavy traffic from the road below and a view across the valley of brake lights on a highway where no one ever seems to move. The air is clear enough up here that I usually only smell me, sweating through the desert heat, except when the garbage truck empties the trashcans and sends up a rotten fruit ripeness, or when the khamsin blows and I can smell the dirt on the hot wind. There’s a mosquito in here, but the bastard isn’t friendly enough to show himself. When he does, I’ll do what people in the Middle East do best. There are already spots of my blood across the whitewash where his brothers and sisters felt the thick side of my fist.

If that sounds like a spoof, you surely know who I’m caricaturing. We decided last week that you couldn’t do much better than the opening paragraph of Hammett’s “Red Harvest” for an introduction to the narrative voice, narrator, place and tone of the entire novel. But if anyone could beat it, we’d have to look at Raymond Chandler. [...]

A very nice review of my new novel Mozart’s Last Aria on Bookreporter.com has this to say, among other amusing and insightful observations:

Music is notoriously difficult to capture in prose; Matt Rees tries valiantly, elegantly, and for the most part successfully to do justice to a composer who is regarded — and not just by me — as a deity. Rees himself comes off in interviews as gently eccentric: “I write standing up, doing yoga stretches, and listening to Mozart,” he confides. I think Wolfgang would have liked that.

If you have a lot of time to waste, you never judge a book by its cover. But don’t try telling me you don’t judge it by its first paragraph.

What makes a great first paragraph? And which are the greatest? We all have favorites, some of which have become clichéd –– as happens to anything, whether it’s the best of times or the worst of times, or if you grew up in a family that was unhappy in its own way. See what I mean?

In general it’s hard to beat Hemingway’s opening to “The Sun Also Rises” for laying out the narrator’s character, as well as the character being described: “Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton. Do not think that I am very much impressed with that as a boxing title, but it meant a lot to Cohn.”

But what about crime fiction? Over the next few weeks, I’m going to look at some of the best first lines and paragraphs in the genre. [...]